With Interesting Marginalia
CYPRIAN.
D. Caecilii Cypriani episcopi Carthaginiensis, martyris Christi opera, quotquot perquirentibus reperire Dei munere concessum est, omnia … Gul. Morellii typographi regii diligentia ac labore …
Paris, Guillaume Des Bois, 1564.
Folio, pp. [48], 483, [37]; large woodcut device to title, engraved initials; some toning, occasional small marks, small wormtrack to lower margins of ff. 323–346, small marginal holes to last 3 leaves; overall very good in contemporary calf, covers tooled in blind to a panel design with floral rolls, four raised bands to spine; extremities worn with old repairs to spine ends and corners, some splitting to joints, marks and rubbing to covers; marginal annotations in several hands (predominantly in one seventeenth-century hand) to c. 100 pp., small label to rear pastedown ‘Ex-libris Werner De Meester'.
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D. Caecilii Cypriani episcopi Carthaginiensis, martyris Christi opera, quotquot perquirentibus reperire Dei munere concessum est, omnia … Gul. Morellii typographi regii diligentia ac labore …
An attractive edition of the works of Cyprian (and indeed Pseudo-Cyprian) edited by the Parisian printer and scholar Guillaume Morel (d. 1564), with interesting marginalia.
A pagan rhetorician who converted to Christianity, Cyprian served as bishop of Carthage, where he was martyred in 258. ‘Cyprian’s writings, mainly short treatises and letters, enjoyed great popularity from the first. He had none of the brilliance of his predecessor, Tertullian, but his sober judgement and pastoral instincts gained him his hearing. Some of his works are also of theological importance, especially those dealing with the Church, the ministry, and the Sacraments’ (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church). Included here, for example, are Cyprian’s De Ecclesiae Unitate ‘a treatise held in special esteem, on the nature of true unity in the Church in its relation to the episcopate’ (ibid.), De Dominica Oratione (on the Lord’s Prayer), and De Opere et Eleemosynis (on almsgiving as a means of obtaining grace).
Morel acted as printer to the Greek scholar Adrien Turnèbe (1512–1565) before becoming Royal Printer himself in 1555. This edition (with a dedication from Turnèbe to Charles IX of France) appeared in three issues, with the imprints of Guillaume Des Bois, as here, Sébastien Nivelle, and Claude Frémy.
The marginal annotations, by what appears to be a seventeenth-century reader, show a particular interest in Cyprian’s epistle to his friend Donatus (written shortly after his own baptism), as well as in patience, virginity, clerical celibacy, Christ’s nativity, fasting, the Last Supper, the washing of feet, and the Holy Spirit, among other topics.
USTC 198723. No copies traced in the US and only three in the UK (Aberdeen, Cambridge UL, Durham).
